


Something New in the Same Face

by arpent



Category: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Depression, Estravan lives, Other, Past non-consensual drug use, Storytelling, ambisexual character, figuring out interspecies sex, kemmer is complicated, lots of feelings, past Therem/Arek, referenced Voluntary Farm trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 10:55:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arpent/pseuds/arpent
Summary: The past month and a half had been no saga, no epic journey worthy of telling. He’d believed that what was happening to him would be the rest of his life. It hadn’t.Nusuth; a wave of a hand, to recreate the snow untrodden.Therem survives crossing the border but spends some time detained in Orgoreyn. Genly gets him back.





	Something New in the Same Face

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lurknomoar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/gifts).



> Thank you so much for getting me to dive back into this amazing novel! I got ten pages into my re-read before I was convinced that Genly and Therem are the most important relationship that has ever existed in this universe or any other. It's almost impossible to do justice to the original book, but I hope this story is something close to what you were hoping for. 
> 
> The title is a quote from the sculptor Alberto Giacometti: “The greatest adventure, greater than any journey around the world, is to see the same face every day and discover something new in it.”

Orgoreyn hadn’t wanted to tell the Envoy details of where and how Karhide’s ex-prime minister had been held since that evening in Anner when Therem had skied across the border, deadly forage-shot sizzling around his ears. Therem knew this because the Orgota commensals had instructed him not to speak about the detention himself, making this silence a virtual condition of his release. Therem had acquiesced, relieved. The past month and a half had been no saga, no epic journey worthy of telling. He’d believed that what was happening to him would be the rest of his life. It hadn’t. _Nusuth_ ; a wave of a hand, to recreate the snow untrodden. Against all his expectations he was in Karhide again, eating crispy breadapple fritters. He was breakfasting with aliens and supping with old friends, each one vying to assert their unwavering faith in him. Of course Genly had asked about how he’d been treated, his dark, alien features taking for a moment a menacing look—but it had always been easy with Genly to make him respect boundaries, even a boundary that truthfully hadn’t existed for a long time.

Amongst the other pleasures waiting for him in Karhide, Therem was able to lose himself in the familiar business of extricating the Envoy from the fresh troubles he’d created for himself. Genly had offended a lot of people during Therem’s disappearance—and almost certainly, he thought with painful fondness, on Therem’s account.

“I’m afraid I don’t have Genly’s knowledge of your customs,” said the alien woman apologetically, bringing Therem a cup of hot orsh when he arrived at their house during the ninth hour of the morning. But though her words were gracious, he heard a shade of doubt, as if she wasn’t certain about the knowledgeable underpinnings of Genly’s behaviour. What _had_ he got up to, without Therem watching over him?

What Genly had been up to, at least that morning, was writing a letter to the Foreign Minister of Sith; but at the sight of Therem he left his writing desk and came forward to clasp him by both hands. He never did this, Therem noticed, without a surging movement, as if one or the other of them had been drowning and the strength of his grip was what would save them. When Therem had tumbled out of the windowless Sarf agency van on the Karhidish side of the border, that grip had been the first thing he felt while he was still squinting blindly, dazzled by a sunlight he hadn’t seen in over a halfmonth.

A few minutes’ conversation were enough for Therem to learn that the phrasing of Genly’s letter was not going well, and a few more for him to say, impatient and amused, “Genry!” The _l_ sound was still impossible.“You don’t have to ask me to waive anything to get my help. I can write the letter with you this afternoon.”

“But—” Without letting go of Therem’s hands, Genly turned toward the window. The sky was thick with the snow-laden clouds of spring, and anyway the house didn’t facing the right direction for him to see what phase the moon was in. “It _is_ Harhahad today, isn’t it?” Genly said

There were a bare handful of people in the world that Therem would expect to know his cycle, but he and Genly had shared a tent for eighty-one days, and there had been no reason, in that time, to hide anything about their bodies. Therem had learned Genly’s square, masculine shape, the big penis and testicles which always look so humorous to anyone not in _kemmer_ but which Genly carried as if they were the most natural thing in the world; and Genly had learned to take more care covering up when the moon was waxing full.

Today, the moon was waxing. Therem saw that, despite his undertaking to the Orgota authorities, he must have intended all along to betray himself, so he said simply, “The drugs haven’t worked their way out of my system yet. I don’t expect—”

He didn’t want to finish, and he didn’t have to. Genly also had experience of being detained at a Voluntary Farm in Orgoreyn, injected with hormones despite their dangerous incompatibility with his alien biology, and he understood in a moment what Therem wished him to know. He understood, moreover, what Therem wanted, and better than he did himself. His face became very careful, very kind, and he said, “In that case, I would be honoured if you would take your evening meal with me.”

It was unsurprising to discover that there was no one else with whom Therem would prefer to spend the date of his _kemmer_ not having sex with. It was precisely what they’d done multiple times already. But knowing it made Therem vulnerable. He was already on edge that evening, deep into the Fifth Hour, when one of the female aliens appeared at the door while Genly was out of the room looking for an envelope for the newly revised and far more coherent letter.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to intrude!” Her name, Therem recalled, was Lang, and she occupied one of the upstairs rooms. “I’m about to go straight to bed and sleep very soundly. I have an early morning tomorrow.”

She spoke with an emphasis that made Therem wonder all over again whether her insight into his planet might already be more astute than Genly’s. If he’d indeed been on the threshold of _kemmer_ , as his body felt obscurely that it ought to be, her mere presence would have been enough to start _thorharmen,_ the tug of maleness in him. And that would have annoyed him seriously, because—well, because he would still have been abstaining, of course, as he’d abstained when he lived in Mishnory. That was sufficient reason.

He listened in silence to the creak of her footsteps on the stairs and the hiss and pop of the fire, until Genly came back in carrying more logs. Therem was making no effort to hide his bleak mood. If questions were unavoidable, as seemed more and more likely, he wanted it over with—the whole story of the Orgota prison with its unimaginative abuses ought to take ten minutes—but once again Genly knew him better he did, for as he busied himself tapping the surface of the beer-jug with the silver pick, he turned to speak over his shoulder:

“You know, I ought to get you to tell some folktales.”

Therem looked at him in surprise.

“I didn’t know, until we got into that village Kurkurast, how good a storyteller you were. It wasn’t something we did on the ice.”

“We were too exhausted.”

“We certainly were.”

Genly brought over the beer. There was an alien custom of knocking the edges of the drinking vessels together before taking the first sip. It was only as Therem was drawing the cup back toward his lips that it occurred to him they were almost halfway through the spring month of Moth, that the fire had already been blazing before Genly added his unnecessary logs, and that the room was much too warm for there to have been any ice on the beer for Genly to break. He must have spent those seconds fussing around with the ice-pick trying to compose a response to Therem’s admission.

He tried to test what he felt about that, but his mind, like his body, seemed as little able to muster a response to Genly as it had for his female colleague. This was depression, he realized. He must have been sinking into it since his release; and it was probably why the next words out of his mouth were, “All our stories are about death.”

It felt true as he said it, like an insight he’d just discovered. He went on, “There’s one—I could tell you one about a man who swore vengeance against his enemy, but found his own son had no interest in his vendetta. He despaired of living long enough to do the thing himself. So this man slew his own son and took his grandchildren, to raise them in the ideals of blood and honour.”

Genly looked impressed despite himself.

“Of course, the secret couldn’t be kept forever. The children found out what had happened, and they left their father’s murderer to die of exposure, according to the laws he himself had taught them.” Therem drank a draught of beer. “That’s the kind of story we tell on Gethen. Death piled on death, and no other way out. _Nusuth_ ,” he said quickly, seeing that Genly’s expression had turned to distress. It was stupid to try to scare the Envoy away. It was uncouth, for no matter how death-crazed the Gethenians, Genly had no way of leaving. He’d thrown in his luck with Therem’s planet; committed to it, long before Therem had meant anything to him but some effeminate courtier who provided him access to the king.

“Forgive me,” Therem said. “I’m not being very good company.” His brain felt thick, and it took too long to find a graceful way to turn the conversation. “I believe we never asked you for any tales from your home world. I’m certain they would have told us more about your insides than all the medical exams.”

“That’s what we believe on Terra,” Genly agreed. “That stories express our deep truths.”

Folktales would have been the only aspect of the alien’s life that hadn’t come under the dissecting scopes of the court scientists, but some of that tough, potent magic that the Terrans believed in, those deep truths, must have seeped though anyway; for Therem, having devoured every word of the scientists’ reports, found that he could almost have recited with Genly when he took a breath and said, “I grew up on the shores of a warm sea.”

It was a formula as thrilling as the Gethenian, _In those days_... Therem had to remind himself that that vision of limitless, never-freezing liquid was probably in reality more like a big tub of tepid bathwater. “It’s an old pirates’ lane,” Genly went on, “Though in our days we tend to romanticize that history. The fast catamarans fly over it like silver gulls.”

The words lulled. Therem let himself sink into them.

“So we have stories of bandits and pearl-divers. Young men or girls in abject poverty going to the bottom of the sea in search of rich gems to win their lovers’ hearts. Or more often, to buy their freedom from cruel masters. The degree of exploitation that used to take place on Terra is hard to conceive of here.” Genly’s voice shifted into that scrupulous tone that belonged to a Mobile and the formal representative of a vast network of worlds. “It’s much more densely populated, for one thing.”

“Here, it’s the same cruel master for everyone,” Therem said. “The snow.” He knew this would make Genly laugh, and it did. Genly’s mouth fell open, and he looked at him with a startled, lazy blink. Therem guessed the hour must be catching up to him for he looked sleepy.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Genly said, still sounding startled, and then fell into mindspeak, almost certainly without thinking about it. _I guess you’d probably rather be in a kemmerhouse, celebrating your freedom. But it’s nice to talk like this._

The words resounded in Therem’s brain in that familiar voice that belonged to someone not Genly, and as usual Therem had to fight to hide a visible recoil. _Arek. Arek, where are you?_ But the voice wasn’t even Arek’s anymore. Without his intention or consent to it, Therem had abetted the alien stealing his dead brother’s voice.

The lulling warmth of Genly’s story had gone cold. The fire’s heat made it hard to breathe. Therem said—for in mindspeak there is no lying— _I like being with you too._

He still knew he would have betrayed Genly a thousand times to have Arek back. But he also felt relief that such an exchange was impossible.

He liked being with Genly; and so this feeling, that a last chance was slipping through his fingers, was doubly stupid. He wasn’t old. He had many _kemmers_ in his lifetime to look forward to. For that matter, if this _kemmer_ had started the way it should have, his courage would undoubtedly have deserted him and he wouldn’t even have come here. He would have been in a kemmerhouse as Genly said, celebrating whatever it was he was supposed to feel glad about—fucking for the Ekumen if you liked, three cheers, hurray. This quiet evening together was infinitely more valuable. And yet. And yet.

When they’d been on the ice together, Genly had had his own complicated reasons to abstain from sex. He’d explained them once, but even through the guaranteed honesty of mindspeak they’d felt halting and obscure to Therem, some off-world scruple whose roots no doubt lay in the under-passages of his alien brain. _I love you_ , had been the most coherent, and least enlightening, piece in it. But at that time Therem had cared less about the explanation than about securing Genly’s agreement; for Therem had no intention of disclosing his own reason for keeping their distance. He wasn’t a distraught and heartbroken child, not anymore, and this time around he wouldn’t make excuses for himself. He suspected that the aliens were able to pledge something to one another, even if they didn’t pledge _kemmering_. Genly’s story about the pearl-divers had hinted as much. But Genly wouldn’t want to give that to someone who couldn’t even mindspeak without the voice of a dead lover rising between them.

Therem realized there were tears in his eyes and recalled belatedly, as Genly jumped from his chair and crossed the room, that they would embarrass the alien.

“You aren’t well,” Genly said, alarmed.

No, he wasn’t well. Detention had taken something from him, some self-sufficiency. That was what the Orgota correctional system was designed to do, and the best he’d managed was to prove its efficacy, passing through their machine like the most ordinary feedstock.

Since he’d returned to Karhide, Therem didn’t know how to talk to his old friends. He’d sat down four times to record a message to Ashe and his sons, then switched the machine off without saying a word. When he turned to work, his old comfort, he couldn’t focus on it. He’d been released in time to witness a society transformed, the achievement of a dream for which he’d sacrificed everything; but the old power games felt more galling by contrast. The new politics in Ehrenrang seemed as preoccupied with the nursing schedule of the king’s infant heir as with the aliens in their midst, and Therem had no energy to give to it.

He doubted more and more that Genly’s immense outlay of effort and favour-calling to get him back from the Orgota had been worth the cost. He was less and less clear why Genly had done it.

“ _Nusuth_ ,” Therem said, with an effort. What difference is there, in the end, between the blank of freshly fallen snow and the blank of wet rock where that snow was scraped away? He started to get up. “It’s late, and you must have work.”

“Please don’t go.”

Genly put his hand on the arm of Therem’s chair to keep him from rising. He met his eyes and said, “I crossed the Gobrin ice sheet with you. Why wouldn’t I go with you through—whatever this is that you’re going through?”

The fire really was too hot for this spring weather, Therem thought.

Genly said, “It doesn’t only work that way, like in your story.” He was talking about the vengeful grandfather and his bitter justice. “I mean, if you teach violence, you die by violence. But if you teach love...” He was close enough that Therem could see him bite his lip. He guessed that Genly’s instinct was to say the next part in mindspeak, but respecting Therem’s discomfort, he spoke aloud. “You taught me to love. You did. And I... love you.”

That had been Genly’s reason for not sleeping with him, Therem remembered. It suddenly no longer baffled him. It had been years since he cared this much about anyone, and the sensation cracked him open. It wasn’t even pleasant, just ruinously necessary, and he got his arms around Genly’s neck to drag him close. They’d huddled like this this in the snow as they waited for Therem to cross the border into Orgoreyn. They’d kept each other alive.

Therem felt fingertips in his hair. He pulled back—no, _she_ pulled back, her head swimming. She felt an ache in her pelvis, a shivery sensitivity in her breasts, and she saw that Genly’s eyelids had lowered. That unfocused blink she’d thought was sleepiness had been desire and—oh! That must have been why Genly’s colleague had hurried so quickly to her bedroom. Not to avoid determining Therem’s gender, but to give them privacy for what she’d assumed would be an intimate scene.

“Sorry!” Genly noticed the difference in Therem’s body, and extricated himself hurriedly. “You’re not—Therem I think you must be—”

She shook her head. Physical changes had begun, but she could tell, by flexing the muscles of her pelvic floor, that they weren’t going far enough for intercourse. Which meant that she should definitely leave, no matter what Genly said. Her emotions surged from muffled distress into panic stronger that overwhelmed her apathy; a need to get out. This was another way for the Orgota and their drugs to humiliate her. It was like standing with no clothes back in the yard of the Voluntary Farm, void of _shifgrethor_ , a sexless body to which things would happen without her control.

Half-blind with distress, she collided with a table with bruising force. Genly was doing his best to be helpful and get out of her way. He was surely remembering, how on the ice during her perfectly functional, healthy _kemmers,_ she’d insisted that he not touch her, like a idiot who believed she would never not have a body she could rely on.

“What is it?” Genly said, lifting his hands palm outward, not moving, but not the less responsible for putting her in this state. “What do you need?” His lips were parted and he was breathing a little hard. His _hieb_ overtunic was rumpled. It was one of those moments that made Therem remember that these bizarre aliens were both always and never in _kemmer,_ and yet they still managed to behave like reasonable human beings.

Genly’s colleague had politely left so they could have sex. As much as Therem wished that a freak avalanche would bury the palace grounds and blot out this ugly, undignified situation, she wanted to be a reasonable human being too, so she tried to explain herself. “Those damned drugs.” Her throat felt rough. “They’re—it’s going to be unpredictable and messy like this for who knows how long.” _This is what you asked to go through with me, these pointless spasms._

Genly licked his lips. “So, what do you want? What should I do?”

“It’s not going to get as far as _thokemmer_ ,” Therem said; the thing she wanted most, wasn’t going to happen. But she saw her hands reach out anyway, blindly, as if she no longer controlled them, wrapping themselves in Genly’s _hieb_ and pulling him close enough to bury her face in its fabric. Genly put his hand on her back, but didn’t ask again; trusting her to know what she was doing. After a while, Therem said, “I have to beg your pardon,” without lifting her face.

“I know the Handdarata have—techniques,” Genly said hesitantly, “Untrance, and meditation, for abstaining during _kemmer_. But if you wanted just to be close for a while... It doesn’t have to lead to anything.”

“Do aliens do that?” Therem’s nose wrinkled, and she thought that those court scientists could have stood to do a more thorough job.

“We do a lot of things,” Genly said, sounding half embarrassed, half defiant; so she had to jab him in his big, square torso and say, “ _Pervert_ ,” to hear his chuckle again.

She weighed the unpredictability of this distorted un- _kemmer_ , the likelihood that what Genly was suggesting would end with her frustrated and unjustly lashing out. Would it be worse than how she felt now? When she’d abstained in Mishnory, it had been hard, but the pain had meant something; her _shifgrethor,_ and not only the grief of exile, had been involved. But the way she felt now, wrung out and broken, she felt no desire to prove anything. She only wanted Genly.

She didn’t need to ask whether Genly, despite his ever-simmering _kemmer,_ could restrict himself to just holding her _._ She trusted him. It had been her fate to trust him, without reservations, and from the moment she laid eyes on him.

“All right,” she said, and kissed him. It was their first kiss, but not even close to the most momentous thing that had happened in their relationship. She liked it. “Yes. Your colleague has told me she is sleeping _very soundly_.”

The bedchamber was comfortably cool. Genly would probably have banked up the fire before lying down to sleep, but they crossed straight to the bed, stopping only to kiss again. Therem liked cradling the back of Genly’s head. The last time she’d done it was to feed him broth while the two of them recovered after escaping Pulefen Farm, and Therem hadn’t been paying attention in the same way to his short, tightly curling hair, or the dear angles of his skull.

“How much did you want to undress?” Genly asked, which seemed unfair. This was his alien un-sex they were doing, Therem was relying on him to tell her how it was supposed to go. But she took stock of her body and said:

“Just the _hieb_ I think,” and they lay down still in their tunics and trousers.

Therem had to assume, given alien biology, that Genly’s sexual tastes probably ran toward exaggerated femaleness, the big breasts that gave alien women that constantly-pregnant look. Though she didn’t question his love for her, she had too much at stake to bear him looking at her small, stocky Gethenian body, marked by the starvation and abuse of the Voluntary Farm. Worse, her genitals were still ambiguously configured, and the taboo against touching someone sexually while they were in _somer_ was so strong that, even wearing trousers next to Genly, she angled her lower body away, stomach momentarily crawling.

Genly’s hand stayed between her shoulder-blades until she got them arranged the way she felt comfortable, heaving a long sigh as she laid her head on his shoulder.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Amazing,” he said, with apparent sincerity.

“Really?” Therem could feel through the clothes that he was hard. This seemed to happen rather haphazardly to aliens; on the Gobrin Ice, for example, while Genly was asleep, during that window of time before exhaustion and hunger apparently suppressed such reactions. Still, she thought an erection had to signify something pretty close to what it did for a Gethenian.

“Therem.” Genly’s fingers squeezed. “This is the first time I’ve felt with my whole body that you’re alive and back safe from those Orgota bastards. I feel amazing.”

She let her hand drift down. It didn’t feel wrong for her to touch him, she discovered as she started to stroke, then wiggled inside the front of his trousers. Genly said something harsh and bitten-off in his Terran language and his hands fell from her body to grip the straw-tick bedding. Therem smiled and stretched up to kiss him while his mouth was slack and he couldn’t summon the wit even to participate.

“You thought I wanted to go to a kemmerhouse,” she said in fond exasperation, and then deliberately switched to mindspeech. _You knew that I loved you._

Genly’s body stiffened as he came, then relaxed under her. An orgasm probably had much less significance when you could have one any day of the month, but Therem felt as pleased as if they’d just crossed the ice-cap again.

Genly’s breathing steadied, and finally he said, aloud, “You had three female _kemmers_ because of me.” Therem realized he was answering her question about the kemmerhouse. “ I thought maybe you missed being male.”

It hadn’t occurred to her, but of course she already knew whatever happened she wouldn’t be spending _kemmer_ with anyone but Genly. That meant never again feeling that lovely, focused type of arousal and completion that came from sex with a penis, but with everything else she was getting, the minor loss hardly grieved her. Genly had hit on an apt analogy: the way out of her depression was a trek as daunting as the icy wastes had been, and for her own survival she couldn’t be looking back for what she’d left behind.

“You know,” Genly said, then broke off. “I don’t know if this suggestion will be offensive.”

“I’ll still regard your _shifgrethor_ in the morning,” Therem said, feeling touched by his perseverance.

Genly said, “Terrans sometimes have sex between the same gender.”

“Of course. In the kemmerhouse.” Though when Therem thought about it that couldn’t be right. The bisexual races of the Ekumen had no _kemmer_ and didn’t need special buildings for it like the Gethenians did. Genly was shaking his head.

“No,” he said, still hesitant. “Only two people, but the same gender.”

Therem felt a throb, as her body made one last effort to reach _thokemmer_ , her mind flying to ways she and Genly could make what he described happen. Without thinking she squirmed, wanting the feel of Genly’s body to aid her imagination. She wanted to be in _kemmer_ for him, and for him to be looking at Therem’s body, androgynous and unhealthy-looking as it was. She had suddenly no doubt that it would be beautiful to him.

With a gasp, Genly put his hands on her hips to hold her still. She took a breath, petting his hair to calm her down. He turned and kissed her palm.

“I should get up and put wood on your fire,” she said in awkward apology. It would give him breathing space. And if the room’s temperature was perfectly comfortable for her, it was bound to be chilly for an alien. But Genly tucked his arm further around her.

“ _Nusuth,_ ” he said. “It’s warm enough with two. Stay until morning.”

“Of course.”

She didn’t say anything else. She kept her lips closed over the vow she was forbidden make; but her body was making it for her; her heart was making it; _Genly_ had made it, as plain as day. Therem burrowed down into the warm bed and let the promise fall around her like the soft spring snows, the beautiful empty new field of the future.

###

 


End file.
